Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron
Shades of Grey 1: Road to High Saffron is a book by Welsh author Jasper Fforde, who also wrote the Thursday Next series, where everything is dominated by color. It takes place in a futuristic version of England called Chromatacia, where the social systems are decided by how much natural color you can see and where the production of spoons is not allowed. On the top of the social ladder are the Purples, and on the bottom are the greys, who see no natural color whatsover. The society is run by the rules of Munsell, the man who founded Chromatacia after “The Something That Happened,” which is an event that no one seems to know about.
The book starts with the book’s main character and narrator, a Red named Eddie Russett, being eaten by a carnivorous tree. He says that it began four days previously, with his father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit while they were in Vermillion. On their way to see the rabbit, a Purple has a type of seizure in a paint shop. Eddie urges his father to help, since he’s a swatch-man (Chromatacia’s equivalent of a doctor) and all Eddie wanted was to get a peek inside of the paint shop, since being a lower class Red, he wasn’t allowed to. It ended with both Eddie and his father discovering that the Purple man wasn’t actually a Purple, but a Grey.
While the authorities wheel the man away, to further help him recover, Eddie sees a girl watching the man with a slight look of concern on her face. After this encounter, Eddie and his father head off to catch their train to East Carmine, a town on the outskirts of the Collective, so that Eddie can conduct a chair census and so his father can fill in as the town’s swatch-man.
After arriving in East Carmine, Eddie finds out that the girl he saw earlier is a Grey named Jane, who somehow transported herself from Vermillion to East Carmine in under an hour or two without taking the only train in the collective. It is through Jane, that Eddie starts to question the known facts about the collective, like why it’s not allowed to make more spoons, why everything has to be so inefficient, and what the Mildew actually is.
Jasper Fforde does a wonderful job at creating characters that are relatable, loveable, and the type that you just want to go away whenever they appear (which is like every Yellow character in the entire book). The world Eddie lives in is unique and complex, where people die from running in to the stray ball lighting and can’t see at night, and where grass is synthetically colored. I found it amazing that a 400 page book could take place over the course of four days, and yet make it seem like it was much longer.
The only con is that the first chapter is rather confusing. I was warned several times by my friend Sean, who suggested the book to me, that it gets better after the first chapter, and that’s mostly because you get used to the long words that are color specific. I however, had to get the audio book to get past the first chapter because my mind was swimming with words like Chromatacia and geochromatic, most of which are words that only exist in this book.
All in all, I highly suggest this book. Also, that way, someone can finally explain to me why no one sees brown, and can help me write letters to the author demanding a closer publication date for its sequel.
